Donald Trump said the following on Fox: “Something is going on. He doesn’t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands. It’s one or the other.” Reiterating this trope later on in the same show, he averred that the President “is not tough, not smart – or he’s got something else in mind.”

Raimondo has written many times about how the U.S. and its allies created ISIS. This DIA document is one of many pieces of evidence. So the mainstream media’s lies are speeding up.

The Washington Post, in its mission to debunk every word that comes out of Trump’s mouth, ran an article by Glenn Kessler minimizing the DIA document, claiming that it was really nothing important and that we should all just move along because there’s nothing to see there. He cited all the usual Washington insiders to back up his thesis, but there was one glaring omission: Gen. Michael Flynn, who headed up the DIA when the document was produced and who was forced out by the interventionists in the administration. Here is what Flynn told Al-Jazeera in an extensive interview:

Al-Jazeera: “You are basically saying that even in government at the time you knew these groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who wasn’t listening?Flynn: I think the administration.Al-Jazeera: So the administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?Flynn: I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.Al-Jazeera: A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?Flynn: It was a willful decision to do what they’re doing.”

Of course, Glenn Kessler and the Washington Post don’t want to talk about that. Neither do the Republicans in Congress, who supported aid to the Syrian rebels and wanted to give them much more than they got. They’re all complicit in this monstrous policy – and they all bear moral responsibility for its murderous consequences.

Avid Trump followers may have known this, but Raimondo’s last sentence hit me like a punch line.

Gen. Flynn, by the way, is an official advisor to Trump, and is often mentioned as a possible pick for Vice President.

That indicates Trump knows exactly what he is saying. He did not need to read about the DIA report at Breitbart. He had much more direct access to the truth. And the media knows that Donald Trump knows what his is talking about. They know it too.

Thus, the huge reaction.

Notice, however, by making vague statements that weren’t immediately understood, Trump probably got more media coverage than he would if he had simply stated the truth—that this administration, with some Republican collusion, made a “willful decision” to allow ISIS to be created.

Joe Scudder is the "nom de plume" (or "nom de guerre") of a fifty-ish-year-old writer and stroke survivor. He lives in St Louis with his wife and still-at-home children. He has been a freelance writer and occasional political activist since the early nineties. He describes his politics as Tolkienesque.